the world is myself

 

In the mirror of your mind images appear and disappear.

 The mirror remains.

 Learn to distinguish the immovable in the movable,

 the unchanging in the changing,

 till you realise that all differences are in appearance only

 and oneness is a fact.

 This basic identity -- you may call God,

 or Brahman, or the matrix (Prakriti),

 the words matters little -- 

is only the realisation that all is one.

Once you can say with confidence born from direct experience:

 'I am the world, the world is myself','

you are free from desire and fear on one hand 

and become totally responsible for the world

 on the other. 

The senseless sorrow of mankind

 becomes your sole concern.

~ Excerpts from I Am That 

by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

may all beings be happy

 

Perhaps nothing more fully expresses the spirit of Jennifer’s lifework

 than the recent performances of “Song For All Beings." 

A large-scale multimedia cirque de spirit, 

these events featured over 100 artists

 and included Bruce Cockburn, Joanna Macy,

 Ferron, Jack Kornfield, Anam Thubten Rinpoche, 

Sarah Dugas, Raz Kennedy, and many others. 

Song For All Beings Live!

 was released as a DVD/video recording of the 2017 show.

In these Arms A Song for all Beings © (p) Jennifer Berezan I cannot turn my eyes, I cannot count the cost Of all that has been broken, all that has been lost I cannot understand, the suffering that life brings War and hate and hunger And a million other things When I've done all that I can And I try to do my part Let sorrow be a doorway Into an open heart And the light on the hills is full of mercy The wind in the trees it comes to save me This silence it will never desert me I long to hold the whole world in these arms May all beings be happy May all beings be safe May all beings everywhere be free

~ Jennifer Berezan

with thanks to When I was 69

fall with me here

So it came time
for me to cede myself
and I chose
the wind
to be delivered to

The wind was glad
and said it needed all
the body
it could get
to show its motions with

and wanted to know
willingly as I hoped it would
if it could do
something in return
to show its gratitude

When the tree of my bones
rises from the skin I said
come and whirlwinding
stroll my dust
around the plain

so I can see
how the ocotillo does
and how saguaro-wren is
and when you fall
with evening

fall with me here
where we can watch
the closing up of day
and think how morning breaks

~ A. R. Ammons

photo by R Christopher Vest

 

where amazement and clear thought twine their slow growth into us

.

.

The most living moment comes when

those who love each other meet each

.

other's eyes and in what flows

between them then.  To see you face

.

in a crowd of others, or alone on a 

frightening street, I weep for that.

.

Our tears improve the earth.  The

time you scolded me, your gratitude,

.

your laughing, always your qualities

increase the soul.  Seeing you is a 

.

wine that does not muddle or numb.

We sit inside the cypress shadow

.

where amazement and clear thought

twine their slow growth into us.

.

~  Rumi

.

experiencing peace and clarity within

 

~ Rupert Spira

I would cease to be

 

God

dissolved

my mind - my separation.

I cannot describe now my intimacy with Him.

How dependent is you body's life on water and food and air?

I said to God, "I will always be unless you cease to Be,"

and my Beloved replied, "And I

would cease to Be

if you

died."

~ St. John of the Cross

from Love Poem from God

translation by Daniel Ladinsky

art by Daniel Taylor

beneath the ancient mountains tears

 

~ Tania

with thanks to Barbara @ When I was 69

losing yourself in love

 

 

 

 

Meditation provides a deeper appreciation 

of the inter-relatedness of all things

 and the part each person plays.

 The simple rules of this game are honesty

 with yourself about where you are in your life

 and learning to listen to hear how it is. 

 

Meditation is a way of listening more deeply,

 so you hear from a deeper space, exactly how it is.

 

 Meditation will help you quiet your mind, 

enhance your ability to be insightful and understanding

 and give you a sense of inner peace.

If you meditate regularly, even when you don’t feel like it, 

you will make great gains, for it will allow you to see

 how your thoughts impose limits on you.

 Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.

When I asked Maharajji how to meditate, he said, 

“Meditate like Christ.” 

I said, “Maharajji, how did Christ meditate?”

 He became very quiet and closed his eyes.

 After a few minutes,

 he had a blissful expression on his face 

and a tear trickled down his cheek. 

He opened his eyes and said, 

“He lost himself in Love.” 

Try the meditation of losing yourself in love…. 

 

 

 

 

~ Ram Dass

 

the weighing

The heart's reasons

seen clearly,

even the hardest

will carry

its whip-marks and sadness

and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved

eland forgives

the drought-starved lion

who finally takes her,

enters willingly then

the life she cannot refuse,

and is lion, is fed,

and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness

measured against all the dark

and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us

only the strength we have and we give it.

Then it asks more, and we give it.

~ Jane Hirshfield

on the nature of awareness

 

~ Rupert Spira

free 'here and now'

 

As long as there is the body and the sense of identity with the body, 

frustration is inevitable. 

All changes in consciousness are due to the "I-am-the-body" idea. 

Divested of this idea, the mind becomes steady. There is pure being, 

free of experiencing anything in particular. 

You are accustomed to dealing with things, physical and mental.

 I am not a thing, nor are you. We are neither matter nor energy,

 neither body nor mind. 

While alive, it [the body] attracts attention and fascinates

 so completely that rarely does one perceive one's real nature.

 It is like seeing the surface of the ocean

 and completely forgetting the immensity beneath.

As long as you take yourself to be a person,

 a body and a mind, 

separate from the stream of life,

 having a will of its own, 

pursuing its own aims, 

you are living merely on the surface, 

and whatever you do will be short-lived 

and of little value.

When you desire and fear, and identify yourself with your feelings, 

you create sorrow and bondage. When you create, with love and wisdom, 

and remain unattached to your creations, 

the result is harmony and peace.

 But whatever be the condition of your mind,

 in what way does it reflect on you?

 It is only your self-identification with your mind

 that makes you happy or unhappy.

 Rebel against your slavery to your mind,

 see your bonds as self-created 

and break the chains of attachment and revulsion.

 Keep in mind your goal of freedom, 

until it dawns on you that you are already free, 

that freedom is not something in the distant future

 to be earned with painful efforts,

 but perennially one's own, to be used! 

Liberation is not an acquisition but a matter of courage, 

the courage to believe that you are free already 

and to act on it.

We are free 'here and now', 

It is only the mind that imagines bondage. 

Once you know your mind and its miraculous powers, 

and remove what poisoned it 

-the idea of a separate and isolated person- 

you just leave it alone to do its work

 among things for which it is well suited. 

~ Excerpts from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's

I AM THAT

trauma: not what you think

 

~ Gabor Mate

listen to my silence

Listen to my silence

that murmurs through these leaves

listen to this unwritten song.

.

Much is heaped between these lines

risen without mouth

silted up in the underground.

.

Listen to my paper-thin silence

that is gone with the wind

through the trees.

.

Hear my voice

at the curve of your mouth

earthlydark.

.

~ Jos Steegstra

photo by Michael Kenna

.

stretch out

Leave the familiar for a while.

Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season

Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.

Make a new water-mark on your excitement

And love.

Like a blooming night flower,

Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness

And giving

Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence

Lie beside an equator

In your heart.

Greet Yourself

In your thousand other forms

As you mount the hidden tide and travel

Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven

Are sitting around a fire

Chatting

While stitching themselves together

Into the Great Circle inside of

You. 

~ Hafiz

see no stranger

 

 

 

 

See no stranger has become a practice that defines my relationships. . . .

 

 Seeing no stranger begins in wonder. 

It is to look upon the face of anyone and choose to say: 

You are a part of me I do not yet know. 

Wonder is the wellspring for love. 

 

Who we wonder about determines whose stories we hear 

and whose joy and pain we share. Those we grieve with,

 those we sit with and weep with, are ultimately those we organize

 with and advocate for. 

 

When a critical mass of people come together to wonder about one another,

 grieve with one another, and fight with and for one another, we begin to build

 the solidarity needed for collective liberation and transformation

—a solidarity rooted in love. . . .

Out in the world, I notice the unconscious biases that arise in me

 when I look at faces on the street or in the news. 

To practice seeing each of them as a sister or brother or family member, 

I say in my mind: You are a part of me I do not yet know. 

 

Through conscious repetition, I am practicing orienting to the world

 with wonder and preparing myself for the possibility of connection.

 (Sometimes I do this with animals and the earth, too!) 

 

It opens me up to pay attention to their story. When their story is painful, 

I make excuses to turn back—“It’s too overwhelming” or “It’s not my place”

—but I hold the compass and remember that all I need to do is be present

 to their pain and find a way to grieve with them. 

If I can sit with their pain, I begin to ask:

What do they need?

 

 

 

~  Valarie Kaur

 Australian aboriginal art

 

 

 

to spareness

.

You lean toward nonexistence,

but have not yet become it entirely.

For this reason, you can still be praised.

The tree unleafing enters your dominion.

An early snowfall shows you abide in all things.

Your two dimensions are line and inclination.

Therefore desire,

though is incinders each mote of its object, itself is spare.

The late paintings of Turner

prove your slender depths without limit.

The beauty too of shakuhachi and cello.

"Winter darkness. Rain. No crickets singing."

-You are there, pulling hard on the rope-end.

Remembering you, I remember also compassion.

I cannot explain this.

Nor how you live in a teabowl

or in a stone that has spent a long time in a river.

Nor the way you at times can signal your own contradiction,

meaning extra, but not by much-

"Brother, can you spare a dime," one thin man asks another.

Any room, however cluttered, gestures toward you,

declaring:

"Here lives this, not that."

In mathematics, the modest "<" sign gestures toward you.

Your season is surely November,

your fruit, persimmons ripening by coldness.

Your sound a crow cry, a bus idling at night by roadside.

Without apparent effect,

and so you remind of starlight on the colors of a cow's hide.

Your proposition, like you, is simple, of interest only to the human soul:

vast reach of all that is not, and still something is.

~ Jane Hirshfield

i am

i am a little church(no great cathedral)

far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities

-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,

i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;

my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving

(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children

whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing

birth and glory and death and resurrection:

over my sleeping self float flaming symbols

of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic

world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature

-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;

i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to

merciful Him Whose only now is forever:

standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence

(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

~ e.e.cummings

.from E. E. Commings:Selected Poems

 

adrift

.

Let my dreams while I'm wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, baptized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, winter, spring,
summer. Leaves over head, under foot.
Waves arrive, buffets from friends
offended, enemies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I'm in.



~ William Stafford

carry my dreams

 

small horses ride me

carry my dreams

of prairies and frontiers

where once

the first people roamed

claimed union with the earth

no right to own or possess

no sense of territory

all boundaries

placed by unseen ones

here I will give you thunder

shatter your hearts with rain

let snow soothe you

make your healing water

clear sweet

a sacred spring

where the thirsty

may drink

animals all

~ Bell Hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins)

 Appalachian Elegy #5

art by Harrison Begay

a blessing

 

~ The Blessing - Aotearoa - 

New Zealand Churches join to sing "The Blessing"

with thanks to Love is a place

before the mind gives us perception; name, form, comparison, is awareness

 

 As you realize yourself in manifestation,

 you keep on discovering that you are ever more 

than what you have imagined. 

Consciousness as such is the subtle counterpart of matter. 

Just as inertia and energy are attributes of matter, 

so does harmony manifest itself as consciousness.

 You may consider it in a way as a form of very subtle energy.

 Wherever matter organizes itself into a stable organism, 

consciousness appears spontaneously.

 With the destruction of the organism,

 consciousness disappears.

The mind produces thoughts ceaselessly, 

even when you do not look at them. 

When you know what is going on in your mind,

 you call it consciousness. 

This is your waking state - your consciousness shifts 

from sensation to sensation, from perception to perception, 

from idea to idea, in endless succession. 

Then comes awareness, 

the direct insight into the whole of consciousness,

 the totality of the mind. 

The mind is like a river,

 flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body; 

you identify yourself for a moment 

with some particular ripple and call it "my thought". 

All you are conscious of is your mind;

 awareness is the cognizance of consciousness

 as a whole.

Consciousness comes and goes,

 awareness shines immutably. 

When there is a person, there is also consciousness.

 "I am", mind, consciousness denote the same state.

 If you say "I am aware", it only means 

"I am conscious of thinking about being aware".

 There is no "I am" in awareness. 

Witnessing is of the mind.

 The witness goes with the witnessed. 

In the state of non-duality,

 all separation ceases. 

It [the witness] is both [real and unreal]. 

The last remnant of illusion,

 the first touch of the real. To say: 

"I am only the witness"

 is both false and true: 

false because of the "I am", 

true because of the witness. 

It is better to say "there is witnessing". 

The moment you say "I am", 

the entire universe comes into being 

along with its creator. 

The witness is merely a point in awareness. 

It has no name and form. 

~ excerpts from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's

I AM THAT

art by Baje Whitethorn, Sr 

Navajo artist

How long does it take to make the woods?

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come into the woods you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.





~ Wendell Berry
 from A Timbered Choir

the clay jug

...

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains,

and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!

All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.

The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.

And the music from the stirings that no one touches, and the

source of all water.

...

It you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:

Friend, listen:  the God whom I love is inside.

...

~ Kabir

mother earth

 

The soul of a culture cannot evolve if the body is not reclaimed and honoured.

 In Navajo mythology, Changing Woman is the creatix. 

She is earth and sky, the Lady of the Plants, and of the Sea.

 She goes beyond the bearer aspect of the mother; 

she is the feminine creator.

Her cosmic cyclic movements-aging each Winter 

and becoming a young beautiful maiden each Spring

-make Her the essence of death and rebirth 

signature of the continual restoration and rejuvenation of Life. 

 This ability to move with the creative impulse 

without trying to force it is an aspect of the feminine. 

There is a quality of the feminine that allows 

things to happen in the natural cycle of things. 

~ from The Heroine's Journey

by Maureen Murdock

art: Navajo sand painting of Mother Earth

by Marie Akee

what you are given

.

You work with what you are given,

the red clay of grief,

the black clay of stubbornness going on after. 

Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,

clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, 

each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table. 

There are honeys so bitter

no one would willingly choose to take them.

The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity, 

honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus—slip and stubbornness,

bottom of river, my own consumed life—

when will I learn to read it

plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire? 

Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, 

we become our choices.

Each yes, each one continues,

this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness. 

The anvil leans into its silence. 

The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

~ Jane Hirshfield

from Given Sugar, Given Salt
art by Vic Muniz

pain and healing

And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, 
so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, 
your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, 
even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen,
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, 
has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened 
with His own sacred tears.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

 art by Sean Lewis

the nature of thoughts

 

Rupert Spira

silently if,out of not knowable

.

silently if,out of not knowable

night's utmost nothing,wanders a little guess

(only which is this world)more my life does

not leap than with the mystery your smile

sings or if(spiralling as luminous

they climb oblivion)voices who are dreams,

less into heaven certainly earth swims

than each my deeper death becomes your kiss

losing through you what seemed myself,i find

selves unimaginably mine;beyond

sorrow's own joys and hoping's very fears

yours is the light by which my spirit's born:

yours is the darkness of my soul's return

-you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars

~ e.e.cummings

the dark night of the soul (excerpt)

 

In the delicious night,

In privacy, where no one saw me,

Nor did I see one thing,

I had no light or guide

But the fire that burned inside my chest.

.

That fire showed me

The way more clearly that the blaze of noon

To where, waiting for me,

Was the One I knew so well,

In that place where no one ever is.

.

I stood still; I forgot who I was,

My face leaning against Him,

Everything stopped, abandoned me,

My being was gone, forgotten

Among the white lilies.

.

~ Saint John of the Cross

a blessing

.

May the light of your soul guide you.

May the light of your soul bless the work you do 
with the secret love and warmth of your heart.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul.

May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, 
and renewal to those who work with you 
and to those who see and receive your work.

May your work never weary you.

May it release within you wellsprings of refreshment,
 inspiration, and excitement.

May you be present in what you do.

May you never become lost in the bland absences.

May the day never burden.

May dawn find you awake and alert, 
approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities, and promises.

May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.

May you go into the night blessed, sheltered. and protected.

May your soul calm, console, and renew you.

.

~ John O'Donohue

(John said, "the soul is not in the body;
 rather the body is to be found in the soul.)

.